Matt Trowbridge: Playing nine in a golf graveyard

Matt Trowbridge

Thursday

Aug 28, 2008 at 12:01 AMAug 28, 2008 at 9:02 PM

Forget U.S. Open rough. Or even British Open gorse. Neither can match the fairways at Trestle Creek Golf & Country Club in Paw Paw, which has turned from a "wonderful amenity" to an ancient ruins of golf in the three years it's waited for a buyer.

Forget U.S. Open rough. Or even British Open gorse. Neither can match the fairways at:

T
EEK
F &
CO
L

That’s Trestle Creek Golf & Country Club in Paw Paw, 40 miles south of Rockford. The T EEK F & CO L are all that’s left on the five-line welcome sign on the front porch on this ghost town of a golf course.

Trestle Creek closed three years ago, when the owners put it up for sale. It never sold. And, in three short years, this challenging little par-32 nine-hole course turned into an ancient ruins of golf.

“It kills me as the mayor and a person who played it to see it sitting there,” Paw Paw Mayor Jerry Nicholson said.

“It was built by a couple of gentlemen here in town, Chet Gaines and Orville Engelhart, basically out of civic pride. Neither one of them golfed, but they always thought it would be a nice thing for the town. It was just a wonderful amenity. We’re constantly trying to grow and maintain our schools and businesses. When you do that, you need something to get people to come here. That was a wonderful thing to have for a little town of 900.”

T EEK F & CO L, for one more day, brought two golfers to Paw Paw. Former Paw Paw basketball standout Matt Torman, a Register Star copy editor, and I pulled up to play the links and see how time had ravaged a once-fine little course.

Except for an empty weed-strewn gravel parking lot and "No Trespassing" signs in every window, the clubhouse looked as if it could still be open for business. There were even 10 pull carts chained up outside the door to the pro shop, three flower planters on the patio railing and a sign telling customers that all alcohol must be purchased on the premises.

But the back patio saw vines growing through the cracks in its deck. And the nearby ninth green was gone, replaced by a circle of dark green 6-foot-tall weeds.

I knew it as the ninth green only because Torman pointed it out. A week earlier, I’d come alone for a visit. Trying to figure out the course, without ever having seen it before, was like assembling dinosaur bones. Except I got my connections all wrong.

I missed the first three holes entirely. Walked several others backward. Vaulted a rusty snowplow to cross a bridge. Saw a couple of rotted wood benches. Walked across a scenic abandoned railroad bridge and followed a narrow trail through the woods, stepping over wayward limbs, ducking others and once getting a face full of spider webs before realizing the golf course didn’t go there.

Got back on track when I found the skeletal remains of a tee marker next to a stand of skinny, dead, white trees. A row of Arborvitae trees to the right clearly guarded some kind of dogleg. When I made the turn and went down a hill, I stumbled upon half of a real golf hole: a 170-yard stretch of mown grass slightly narrower than a U.S. Open fairway just to the right of some of Paw Paw’s finest homes, complete with backyard pools and two elevated gazebos that looked like watch towers from an 1800s U.S. Army fort.

The next week, Torman gave me the correct tour.

No. 1 began at the end of the parking lot, well to the left of anywhere I’d walked. A 359-yard par-4, it didn’t give you much room to hit, with a stand of trees to the right and out of bounds to the left. I hit my drive 200 yards right down the middle. At least I think I did; we never found it in the knee-high grass blown flat by the wind, about calf-high, like new-mown hay.

Torman’s tour gave me the clues for a golf-course archaeological examination. Long, bent-over grass meant a fairway. Unless it was on a small hill. Then it meant a tee box. And 6-foot weeds in a circle meant a green. Saplings meant nothing. Thousands of them grew everywhere.

As I “played” the course, I somehow found four of my nine tee shots, including one I stepped on. On No. 3, an incredibly short 60-yard hole downhill over a creek, you couldn’t see the green; the brush had grown so tall on the cliff it made a wall in front of the tee.

No. 7 turned out to be a 228-yard par 3 with thick woods to the left and more trees and a pond to the right. “Nobody liked that hole,” Torman said. No. 9 was also tough: a par-4 with a winding creek and only a 25-yard gap between the trees for an approach shot.

It’s easy to see why Paw Paw treasured this course, built on rolling hills in 1987. And were happy when new owners bought it after Gaines and Engelhart died.

“I was excited because I heard they were going to fix it up,” said Dave Moorehead, 29, whose grandparents live next door to Trestle Creek. “We always complained about the simple things, like never having flat tee boxes. And they talked about making it 18 holes; I don’t like to golf if I’m going to just play nine.”

But in the first year of new ownership, seven inches of rain hit Paw Paw in two hours, flooding the course in June and washing out several bridges. The grand plans, except for a nice restaurant/bar in the clubhouse, disappeared. Eventually, so did the course. What used to be a “wonderful amenity” is fast becoming an eyesore.

“I wish someone would buy it just to clean it up, even if they don’t make it a golf course,” said Moorehead, who hates the way it looks right next to his grandparents’ house.

The mayor, who now golfs at Shady Oaks in Amboy, still hopes it can be a golf course again.

“It was a fun little course, it really was,” Nicholson said as he took a break from watching the Cubs game on a small TV in his brother’s garage. “I think about it all the time. Alllll the time. There’s not a weekend that I’m on a golf course that I don’t get asked if it will ever be run again.

“It’s unbelievable how Mother Nature takes something over immediately, but it could be redone. My son-in-law was a greenskeeper there, and he tells me we could get it back in shape.”

It doesn’t seem likely. Even the "For Sale" sign out front is out of date.

“I don’t have it listed anymore,” real estate agent Jim Angelotti said. He had been asking $14,000 an acre, or $2.66 million, for the 40-acre course and 150 surrounding acres.

“We were hoping to sell it for someone to use as a golf course again and do development around it,” Angelotti said.

But rural golf courses have become difficult to market.

“Anything rural,” Angelotti said, “is a tough sell.”

So the sign on the street next to the parking lot seems to also address T EEK F & CO L. This sign has no fallen letters. It’s easy to read: "Dead End."

Matt Trowbridge can be reached at (815) 987-1383 or mtrowbridge@rrstar.com.

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